Circa 1989, or Now
by scullyseviltwin
Summary: They hold coffee and tea and try to talk, but it's not the same because it's not dark and there isn't anything on the line and they're not sitting just a shade too close together.


_Many thanks to the loverly Eliza. She's lover-ly. That is all._

* * *

She's stuck perpetually in 1989.

For a while. In her head.

Mostly in her dreams (nightmares really, but the word just feels too childish), she's back in acid wash, dreaming of things she'll never have but still wants. Olivia, in her head, feels like she's back on the cusp of college, waiting for that big transformation that every pending-freshman is supposed to have.

It never came for her back then. She was still the brilliant, semi-heard, outlandish teenager from the City. She wanted to become the brainiac, the nerd, someone who was more than a body, more than a mouth, more than a few cuss words tossed off-handedly at a bar.

She talked too much then.

2006 and she hardly talks to him at all.

* * *

A brief reprieve from the silence, in October when she's sipped a few too many beers.

The bars smells like cigarettes even though smoking has been banned in this establishment. Olivia wonders if she'll ever get the smell out of her nose and wonders aloud why a freshly lit cigarette smells like the most enticing thing to her.

"Because it's a vice," Elliot responds, doesn't look at her, but focuses instead on the jukebox that is slowly churning out shitty jazz. Fuck jazz; neither one of them has ever liked jazz. He wants to tell her this and she wants to tell him this but she can't stop thinking about nicotine and tar.

She worries her tongue over a dry spot on her lip and fixes her eyes on the red of the booth that's supporting his back.

They're always in booths.

Beer in the pitcher, there's still some left but her hands feel too heavy to pour some out. "I used to smoke," she says, maybe to him but it sounds 'to-no-one-in-particular.' Off-handed has never been her thing and he wonders why the hell she keeps trying to pull it off.

He knows her, better than he knows anyone. It's a vice of the job, he supposes and idly wishes that he knew her for other reasons, more intimate reasons. "Why'd you stop?"

There's malice and regret and humor all wrapped around her tongue when she answers him. "I thought it'd kill me."

Something flashes in his eyes and then it's gone; Olivia thinks she feels his foot brush hers in the cool dampness of the darkness under the table.

She doesn't dwell on it too long because he reaches across and pinches the back of her hand, squeezing papery-thin skin between friction ridges.

"I never smoked," he wants to say something else entirely but that's what comes out and it makes her smile, so he divides up what's left of the warm beer and they don't speak again for a long time.

* * *

She talks more now, sometimes over mismatched mugs of tea and coffee, sometimes over styrofoam cups. Olivia pretends that she says nothing in particular. When she speaks, she looks out the window and tries to get lost in some reverie she can't retrieve and tries to sound far off, but she always talks about something and he knows this.

He just never says anything.

Elliot's words are an extra packet of sugar, shaken too hard when the moment becomes quiet and a clink of a spoon on the side of a ceramic mug. Elliot looks far off, distant, like he's gazing out a window at nothing, nothing, nothing-at-all.

But he hears every word she says.

He doesn't know how to help and so it's another helping of sugar and a sip that scalds his tongue and bubbles the roof of his mouth.

They're not good with the hotter beverages, but they're more appropriate for the daytime, for stakeouts. They hold coffee and tea and try to talk, but it's not the same because it's not dark and there isn't anything on the line and they're not sitting just a shade too close together.

It's in Harlem where they ring in the new year over tepid 7/11 swill and he waxes poetic about champagne. She just tells him that she'll settle for a beer.

They smile at one another.

Quiet.

Neither of them made resolutions for 2007.

* * *

They've never experienced a last call, not while alone and certainly not when accompanied by the other. Last call is reserved for newly-legal kids and the seasoned derelicts and debutants of the Apple. It's never been their style. 

Yet, they find themselves picking stale peanuts out of a tattered bowl and watching the clock tick the night away. It'll be morning soon and Olivia tries to remember when the last time she saw a sunrise was. She thinks maybe Elliot would like to go up to the roof of her building and watch the sun expose all of the impurities of the streets below.

She lives in a high rise; the view would be great.

But instead they sit, watch CNN or MSNBC or something with a ticker and avoid talking altogether.

"Ever wonder how many therapists need therapy themselves?" he asks her and she wants to be startled, but her body and mind are too numb; she just grunts.

They listened to the pained story of a high school girl who was raped by several members of the football team today.

The girl was a fraud.

The girl now knew the meaning of perjury.

No one felt good about it; Elliot wanted to break something but he wasn't sure he could summon the strength for rage. He wants to talk now and she wants to drink and think about sunrises and distant sunsets but she humors him because Olivia knows the push and pull.

She's been the pull far too much lately.

So she pushes him, "I'd hope a lot of them do, you know?" She doesn't know, she doesn't know what the hell she's saying either, but she sees that it begins a fissure in him. Elliot's spine straightens and he swivels on the stool, facing her.

A brow raised, a challenge, almost like nothing has changed, almost as though they are two completely different people. "And endless cycle of psychiatry?"

A laugh explodes into her beer. "A psychiatric cycle?"

"Yeah," he laughs too and the bartender refills their pitcher.

Maybe she's back in 1989 because she leans her cheek on her hand and looks at him, her face too severe for the posture she sports. "If you ever asked me to, you know I'd wait."

He doesn't say a thing, but slides his hand a sliver closer to hers on the bar and pulls from his beer.

Olivia's never needed much, just something to go on.

Something like that.


End file.
